Composable data, a flexible and modular approach in the field of data analytics, benefits decentralized application (dapp) developers constrained by the limitations of current data protocols. Swaroop Hegde, co-founder of Powerloom, explains that composable data maintains a decentralized database of data points verified through a consensus mechanism. Clean Insights Versus Actionable Intelligence Hegde, a thought […]
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A proposal aiming to contribute to funding the legal defense of the developers of Tornado Cash, the Ethereum-based mixing platform, was removed by the Arbitrum community over apparent legal concerns. Devansh Mehta, lead of the working group of the Arbitrum treasury, criticized the move, stating that there was “absolutely nothing wrong with paying for the […]
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An activist group launched a legal defense fund for accused Tornado Cash developers Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm on Jan. 22.
Roman Storm endorsed the fundraiser, stating:
“2024 is the year that will define the rest of my life. Honestly, I’m scared. But also hopeful that this community cares with a passion. Please donate towards my legal defense.”
The DAO was also announced by Ameen Soleimani, who is associated with various Ethereum and cryptocurrency projects. Soleimani wrote:
” … Roman & Alexey are fighting for all of us. The outcomes of these trials will have far reaching consequences for ETH devs & users, especially those working on privacy tools.”
The fund is organized by a group called Free Pertsev & Storm. The group stated that the fundraiser will run from Jan. 22 to Feb. 22 and noted that the defendants’ legal fees would range between $90,000 and $100,000 per month. It added that the “upcoming months will be crucial in shaping their defense strategy.”
Donations are possible through three fundraising platforms. As of 11:00 p.m. UTC on Jan. 22, Free Pertsev & Storm’s fundraiser page on JuiceBoxDAO had attracted 23 ETH ($53,300) through 78 donations.
Additionally, the group’s GoFundMe fundraiser raised $14,745 through cash donations. Another website at WeWantJusticeDAO.org appears to be accepting donations as well, though it does not report the raised amount publicly.
The U.S. initially took action against Tornado Cash in August 2022 as the Treasury blacklisted various on-chain crypto addresses linked to the service.
About one year later, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) began to pursue charges against the platform’s developers. The agency charged Storm over his role in developing the coin mixer Tornado Cash in August 2023, alleging conspiracy charges around money laundering, sanctions violations, and the operation of an unlicensed money-transmitting business. The DOJ simultaneously charged another individual, Roman Semenov, who remains at large.
Alexey Pertsev was arrested in the Netherlands in August 2022, facing similar money laundering charges. He does not currently face charges in the U.S. but has been designated by the Treasury for his role in Tornado Cash.
U.S. authorities maintain that Tornado Cash and other coin mixers are used in money laundering and by cybercrime groups, including North Korea’s Lazarus Group. Crypto community members have largely countered this and asserted that coin mixers have legitimate privacy applications for general users.
Incidentally, the DeFi Education Fund submitted a comment opposing a federal proposal to treat coinmixers as a special money laundering concern.
Currently, there are plans to deploy Dencun on the Sepolia testnet on January 31, and then on the Holesky testnet on February 7.
Among the many things that the crypto industry has to look forward to, there is the Dencun upgrade for the Ethereum network. Touted as a way for Ethereum to increase its data processing abilities and scalability, it is largely seen as a game-changer by those in the industry. Now, we are a step closer to this upgrade as Ethereum developers have deployed a testnet of Dencun on the Goerli test network. This took place on January 17, 2024, at 6:32 UTC.
While the Dencun testnet launch was eventually deployed, it did meet some challenges along the way. Most notably, it wasn’t able to reach finality and this is credited with validators not completing software upgrades and this led to low participation rates.
“And it seems like we have a chain split! Client teams are looking into it, but it’s likely to take a while to pin down + fix the issues. Keep an eye out for updates!” Tim Beiko, an Ethereum core developer, said.
Finality, in terms of blockchains, refers to the mechanism that makes transactions irreversible. It is one of the most important parts of any blockchain network and has to be gotten right. The developer teams have confirmed that they are looking into these issues and should resolve them in the next few days.
At the same time, this is one of the purposes of testnet deployment- to make sure that any potential kinks are worked out before the final launch date. And this isn’t the last deployment we will see before Dencun fully goes live.
Currently, there are plans to deploy Dencun on the Sepolia testnet on January 31, 2024, and then on the Holesky testnet on February 7. All these will lead up to the final Dencun deployment by the end of the first quarter of the year.
One thing that the blockchain community knows very well at this point is that a single network upgrade can change the very trajectory of an ecosystem. Ethereum itself experienced this with its last major upgrade that saw the network moving from a proof-of-work consensus to a proof-of-stake one. This move saw the network’s energy use cut by over 95% and made Ethereum much better for the environment.
The Dencun upgrade is also on track to be impactful by introducing proto-danksharding. This is a mechanism that will increase Ethereum’s capacity for data handling and make it cheaper to use. As such, Ethereum will become more scalable once it is implemented and naturally, there has been a lot of anticipation for this. While this testnet launch has seen its hiccups, we can hope that they are sorted and the final Dencun upgrade goes off without a hitch.
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Ethereum (ETH) developers have outlined a comprehensive plan for the network’s development in 2024, including significant upgrades and new proposals after their latest execution layer meeting on Dec. 8.
A key focus is on the deprecation of the Goerli testnet, with a fork scheduled for early 2024. This move is part of the strategy to activate ‘Dencun’ on the Ethereum network in January, marking a significant advancement in its technological capabilities.
The Dencun upgrade will introduce a novel concept in transaction processing termed ‘blob-carrying transactions.’ In this context, ‘blobs’ is an acronym for ‘Binary Large Objects’. The primary purpose of these blobs is to refine the way Ethereum stores and retrieves data by reducing the amount of data that must be stored indefinitely on the Ethereum blockchain.
Consequently, the transaction costs associated with data storage are expected to decrease, making overall transactions more economical. It is a critical step toward the long-term goal of danksharding, a planned scaling solution that breaks the network into smaller, parallel segments (shards) to increase capacity and efficiency.
Another notable development is the introduction of a new proposal aimed at enhancing the power of Execution Layer (EL) clients. The proposal, designed to counteract potential censorship in the mempool, would enable EL clients to override local builders using various heuristics.
For instance, clients could override when detecting transactions with excessively high fees pending for extended periods. However, adopting such heuristics has not yet been implemented broadly, with only Geth currently having an open pull request on the issue.
In terms of process updates, the development of a Meta Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) for Dencun has been a significant milestone. This is complemented by a draft for a “Meta EIP backfill,” which aims to provide specifications for upgrades previously lacking Meta EIPs.
The discussion around Meta EIPs has been vital in simplifying access to fork specifications, although there is an ongoing conversation about their role and naming conventions, according to ETH developer Tim Beiko.
Looking forward, the Ethereum community is preparing for the Prague/Electra network upgrade. Among the proposals for this upgrade is EIP-6110, which proposes a new method for supplying validator deposits on-chain, replacing the older Eth1 bridge system.
Future upgrades may also include Verkle Tries on the Execution Layer and Data Availability Sampling (DAS) on the Consensus Layer, necessitating in-depth technical reviews and discussions.
The Ethereum community is encouraged to take an active role in shaping the future of the network by participating in these technical discussions and expressing their preferences for potential features in the upcoming upgrades through forums and GitHub threads.
Client teams are set to review these proposals, with more detailed discussions planned for January. This planning forms part of the broader strategic development of the Ethereum network, reflecting the continuous efforts by the developer community to evolve and refine the platform.
The Ethereum developer community remains actively engaged in enhancing the network’s capabilities, with a clear roadmap set for 2024. The upcoming developments and proposals highlight the network’s ongoing commitment to innovation and responsiveness to community feedback.
Bitcoin (BTC)-based Ordinals (ORDI) price briefly fell under $50 after renowned BTC core developer Luke Dashjr described Inscriptions as bugs on the blockchain network that must be fixed.
In a Dec. 6 post on social media platform X, Dashjr said inscriptions’ were exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain.
Ordinal Inscriptions are digital assets similar to NFTs inscribed on a satoshi, BTC’s lowest denomination. These assets had gained popularity earlier in the year and heralded Bitcoin’s foray into the NFT space.
However, these assets have ignited several debates within the community, with some describing it as an attack on Bitcoin due to its ability to flood the blockchain with data. In contrast, others see it as an evolution of the network.
Dashjr, one of the most prominent critics of Ordinals, stated:
“Bitcoin Core has, since 2013, allowed users to set a limit on the size of extra data in transactions they relay or mine (`-datacarriersize`). By obfuscating their data as program code, Inscriptions bypass this limit.”
CryptoSlate Research previously highlighted how the presence of Ordinals Inscriptions on the network led to longer wait times for transaction confirmations.
For context, data from mempool shows that more than 270,000 transactions were unconfirmed as of press time.
Following Dashjr’s statement, Bitcoin Ordinals-based ORDI token price fell below $50 before recovering to $51.49 as of press time, according to CryptoSlate’s data.
Data from CoinGlass shows that the price retracement resulted in nearly $5 million in losses for long traders within the past 4 hours.
The token is one of the best-performing digital assets of the current crypto market bull run, gaining around 377% during the last 30 days to rally to an all-time high of $65, and its market capitalization shot to $1.08 billion during the period.
Despite its price retracement, ORDI’s price is over 2,000% higher than its Sept. 11 all-time low of $2.86.
Dashjr hinted that the network might soon see an end to Ordinal Inscriptions if the bug is fixed. He said the bug was fixed in Bitcoin Knots v25.1, but the Bitcoin Core remains vulnerable in the upcoming v26 release. He added:
“I can only hope it will finally get fixed before v27 next year.”
However, some community members have described the action as network censorship. Trevor Owens, a venture capital investor in BTC startups, said:
“Whether it gets added to Bitcoin Core v27 or not (hint: it won’t) the inscriptions will never stop. People will pay for them and miners will mine them. As long as the market demands it, there is nothing you can do to stop it.”
Yang Huiyan, the chair of the property giant Country Garden, has lost about $29 billion since 2021.
Huiyan lost $490 million on Tuesday as her company missed interest payments, according to Bloomberg.
Country Garden reported that sales plummeted by 30% year-on-year in the first six months of 2023.
Yang Huiyan — once Asia’s wealthiest woman — has lost more of her wealth than any billionaire since June 2021 as China’s top property developer, Country Garden, grapples with a debt crisis.
Yang’s net worth has plummeted by 84%, or $28.6 billion, since its peak in June 2021, Bloomberg reported. The 41-year-old’s net worth is now $5.5 billion, per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
These losses come as Country Garden missed interest payments on two US-dollar-denominated bonds, according to various media reports, including a Reuters report on Wednesday. The company now has a 30-day grace period to avoid an official default.
The company’s Hong Kong-listed stocks have plunged by 20.4% since Monday. Yang derives much of her wealth from a 52.6% stake in the company, per a Monday report by the ratings agency Moody’s. She saw her wealth tank by about $490 million on Tuesday.
Before taking over as majority shareholder of the company from her father in 2007, Yang graduated from Ohio State University as part of the class of 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing and logistics.
But Country Garden’s fortunes have waned since. The company remains China’s biggest property developer in sales, but its market value has more than halved since the start of the year, according to The New York Times.
In July, the company reported sales of 128.76 billion yuan, or about $17.8 billion, in the first six months of the year, marking a 30% decrease compared to the same period last year.
Yang, who became China’s richest woman at 25 after the company’s IPO, lost the spot of Asia’s richest woman in August 2022 to Savitri Jindal. Jindal, India’s richest woman, is the chairperson emeritus of the Indian conglomerate O.P. Jindal Group, per Bloomberg.
On July 30, Yang announced that she was giving away 55% of her shares in Country Garden to a charity founded by her younger sister in a payout valued at $826 million, per Bloomberg.
Country Garden and Yang Huiyan did not respond to requests for comment from Insider.
Read the original article on Business Insider
While Polygon Zero is claiming the code was used without the original copyrights or clear attribution to the original authors, Matter Labs stated that the code was “prominently attributed” in a line atop one of the files in question.
Polygon and Matter Labs continue their competition on building zero-knowledge rollups. Polygon’s unit Polygon Zero, which is standing behind a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum (ETH), has accused an award-winning innovation lab Matter Labs of plagiarism. According to Polygon Zero, Matter Labs developers employed “a substantial amount of source code” from its Plonky2 library without permission.
Crypto runs on the open source ethos. When projects don’t follow it, the ecosystem suffers.
We were disappointed to see that @zksync copied our code without attribution and made misleading claims about the original work, so we wrote this post.
— Polygon Zero 💜 (@0xPolygonZero) August 3, 2023
While Polygon Zero is claiming the code was used without the original copyrights or clear attribution to the original authors, Matter Labs stated that the code was “prominently attributed” in a line atop one of the files in question.
Back in January, Polygon launched its Plonky2 – a zero-knowledge proving system that represents a major breakthrough for zero-knowledge (ZK) tech. This recursive SNARK is claimed to be 100x faster than existing alternatives and natively compatible with Ethereum. It works by using large proofs when speed matters and small proofs when size matters. Its flexibility allows Plonky2 to optimize for speed and cost.
Recently, Matter Labs has also come up with a proof solution based on a new Rust-based cryptographic library from zkSync that powers the prover’s upgraded zero-knowledge circuits – vital components of zkSync Era and ZK Stack. Called Boojum, the solution is promised to be 10x faster than Plonky2.
Following Matter Labs’ release, Polygon Zero has found multiple similarities in the underlying tech of Plonky2 and Boojum. The company’s team has compared both solutions in its blog post and accused Matter Labs of plagiarism.
Polygon Zero developers wrote:
“Matter Labs, developers of zkSync, recently released a proving system called Boojum that includes a substantial amount of source code that is copy-pasted from performance-critical components of the Plonky2 library. This code is included without the original copyrights or clear attribution to the original authors. As an aside, it’s very difficult to fail to abide by the terms of the MIT/Apache licenses, but this is how to do it.”
The document also includes screenshots of both codes’ comparisons.
In response, Matter Labs called Polygon’s claims “untrue” and highlighted that the similarity between the solutions is mentioned in the first line of its module.
Matter Labs representative said:
“The new Boojum high-performance proof system leverages 5% from Plonky2, which is prominently attributed in the first line of our module. Where else, other than the very first line of our library would this have been included if we wanted it to be more prominent?”
Matter Labs and Polygon have been competing in developing zkEVM rollups for quite a long. The plagiarism accusations that have taken place in their case are not the first time something similar happens. Another example of copying the code is Shibarium layer-2 beta testnet that had allegedly used Shiba Inu code without permission.
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Darya is a crypto enthusiast who strongly believes in the future of blockchain. Being a hospitality professional, she is interested in finding the ways blockchain can change different industries and bring our life to a different level.
A recent report released by the United Kingdom’s Law Commission could weaken a central argument brought by Craig Wright in his controversial lawsuit against 12 Bitcoin Core developers, argues the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund (BLDF).
In a 300-page report on digital assets published in late June, the Law Commission — an independent body that reviews and recommends reforms to U.K. and Whales laws — cited a classification of fiduciary duty that bolsters the developers’ defense that they are not directly responsible for 111,000 Bitcoin (BTC) lost to hackers.
Wright, owner of Tulip Trading, claimed in a 2021 lawsuit that developers involved in the open-source development of Bitcoin Core owed him a fiduciary duty in connection with his loss. In order to recover the allegedly stolen funds, Wright is seeking a back door into the Bitcoin blockchain. Wright is also known for claiming he is Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
The bitcoin protocol was set in stone to create a system that is stable. Bitcoin is not a Cryptocurrency. By definition, Cryptocurrencies are anonymous and untraceable. Bitcoin is pseudonymous and traceable, it is digital cash.
Don’t believe everything you see at first sight. pic.twitter.com/vPt4a0fEEx
— Dr Craig S Wright (@Dr_CSWright) May 30, 2023
The U.K. report sheds light on the definition of fiduciary duty, claiming that categories of fiduciary recognized by the law include “agents, trustees, partners, company directors, and solicitors.” The report said fiduciary duty rarely exists outside these categories. According to the BLDF, the developers’ legal representative, the defendants do not fit any criteria mentioned by the Commission.
“They are not agents, trustees, partners, company directors, or solicitors, and they never ‘undertook or were entrusted with authority to manage the property or make discretionary decisions on behalf of another person,’” BLDF stated in a recent blog post, adding that “Bitcoin was created to facilitate transactions between individuals without the need to entrust any authority to a third party.”
According to a definition by the University of Texas, fiduciary duty is the “legal responsibility to act solely in the best interest of another party.” Common examples of fiduciary duties include undivided loyalty, due diligence, full disclosure of conflicts of interest and confidentiality.
The Tulip Trading suit could set case law for open-source developers’ liability for assets, with a trial in the case expected to occur in 2024. During the Bitcoin 2023 conference in May, Jessica Jonas, BLDF’s chief legal officer, noted that potential legal ramifications of the lawsuit could deeply affect the community of open-source developers, as 97% of the world’s software programs are open-sourced.
The U.K. Law Commission report also pushed for the creation of a new and distinct category of personal property to accommodate the unique features of digital assets.
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